Every night, Dianne Durkin mentally runs through her day to make sure she's learned something new, and is she hasn't, she turns the light back on and reads untill she comes across something she didn't know —actualizing the live it- become it philosophy she imparts through her training and consulting firm, Loyalty Factor LLC.

According to Durkin, it's employee loyalty that advances the bottom line, and it's the environment for excellence provides that fosters dedication. Her own nighttime reading stems from her conviction that practice does make perfect when it comes to learning and living new behaviors.

""I firmly believe that employees drive your customer loyalty, which then drives your brand recognition," the founder and president says. "We're helping people be the best that they can be, and when we do that, we help companies continue to grow and prosper."

In both its consulting and customized training divisions, Loyalty Factor dissects an organization's core, or employee, issues to provide solutions and improving performance and thereby increasing profits. It's a timeless concept. In a recession, companies rely on Loyalty Factor to help retain customers; in a soaring economy, the focus is on employee retention.

"The process we use is to build loyalty from the core of the company, thereby lasting the test of time. If that core is not happy, the customers aren't happy. If customers are not happy, you're not going to be able to build your brand," Durkin says.

The concept has stood Durkin and Loyalty Factor in good stead. Focusing msotly on Fortune 500's, the firm, composed of four full-time staff and siz consultants, grew 105 percent in 2001. Despite the continuing sluggish economy, it's tracking ahead of last year's performance. In fact, Durkin is looking into expand the New Castle, N.H.-based firm to a second location.

Durkin formed Loyalty Factor in 1996, the culmination of practices she developed during multiple senior positions at Digital and several subsequent entrepreneurial ventures. Through each of her management experiences, she incorporated the human side of business into her operations design. Yet, getting to the Loyalty Factor concept was a gradual process.

After earning a Master's in math, Durkin began her career in the early 1970s as a financial analyst for Gulf Oil and then moved on to General Electric. It was at GE that she was convinced to try the more people-oriented side of the business—sales—on a trial basis. The first woman in the division, and "fearless", she became the top salesperson on the East Coast.

Recruited by Digital, Durkin started her 16-year tenure there training 200 to 300 salespeople a month during the computer company's glory days. She then progressed through the other executive positions: head of product, industry and then skills training, head of sales targeting the AT&T breakup, and head of sales programs for the global office automation effort.

Realizing that she'd never match her last job at Digital—with its 35 sales centers around the world serving every kind of industry, 700 staffers and a full senior management team—Durkin broke out on her own. First she set up a manufacturing company in Poland with her brother, and then she began her own consultancy around sales and marketing integration in the Boston area.

"My belief was you had to have your vision, your values, and your positioning very clear, and once you had those very clear, then you could develop your sales plan and your marketing plan, which are integrated and would help drive one another."

In time, Durkin and another like-minded consultant formed Corporate Branding Partnership in Connecticut to focus on mergers and acquisitions as well as new companies. Her partner did teh identity piece; she developed the consulting end around the integration of business practices, the people, the cultures, and the vision-values-positioning.

When her partner decided to return to advertising, Durkin continued developing her best-practices theories with Loyalty Factor, setting up shop in New Hampshire.

"It wasn't until I formed Loyalty Factor that it all came together. You formulate these things over the years," she says.

Durkin arranged Loalty Factor as two divisions, consulting and training. She focused the consulting side of the house on change-management initiatives and built training around customer relationships and leadership management. Consulting issues can range from a new VP wanting to reorient processes, to merger and acquisition's broader challenges. All training programs are customized fot the client organization and include extensive role-playing around the client's tasks-at-hand.

These days, with the recession's emphasis on customer retention, call center training is in particular demand. "The call center is a very different dynamic," Durkin explains. "What people don't realize is that only 7 percent of communications is words, 38 percent is voice and 55 percent is physiology. When you're on the phone, you've got to compensate for that physiology. The way that we do it is we go into the neuro-linguistic programming techniques that target phone as opposed to in-person, communication."

Differentiating Loyalty Factor is the emphasis on self-awareness coupled with learning that can be applied at home and at work. Training is done in modules spread out over time as opposed to a workshop held over several consecutive days. This helps to ingrain new behaviors through long-term repitition. "It becomes second nature. That's what makes the real difference," Durkin says.

Loyalty Factor targets mostly Fortune 500s headquartered in New York, New Jersey, and New England, although the firm has trained all over the U.S. and Europe as well as in Singapore, hong Kong, and China. Almost 90 percent of business has been through referral.

At the time of this interview, Durkin was filling a new business development position so she could concentrate on further growth. This year, she expects to introduce follow-on to existing training programs and plans to open a new location around business volume. At the moment, she's looking at Jacksonville, FLa., a growing nucleus for call centers, as well as New York City and Washington D.C., which would accomodate today's cross-industry demand.

Durkin thrives on her non-stop schedule. "Energy, stamina and persistence, I think that's what helps me. I hardly sleep. I love what I do," she says. "What drives me is making a difference and making a change. I'm always on the go. I'm always looking at how I can better myself. We're all about learning and teaching and helping people grow, and so that's what I do myself—absolutely live it."